This invention relates in general to advertising, and in particular to advertising campaign management and optimization systems and methods. More specifically, the present invention provides methods and systems for facilitating the selection and delivery of advertisements using advertiser imposed constraints and targets to generate one or more media plans for distributing one or more advertisements.
An advertisement campaign may include a set of one or more advertising activities or conduct directed to accomplishing an advertising goal, such as the marketing or sales of a particular product, service, or content, or a group of products, services or content. The success of an advertising campaign depends on making the most efficient possible use of an advertising budget so as to maximally influence audience behavior. For example, if a campaign is directed to selling a product, then the advertiser may seek to use a given budget to purchase advertising so as to cause a maximum amount of consumers to purchase the product. Determining how to efficiently and optimally spend an advertising budget, as well as implementing and managing an ongoing advertising campaign utilizing such a budget, can pose a daunting challenge to advertisers.
Increasingly, advertising campaigns include online or Internet-based advertising. With ever-increasing Internet use, it is only natural that greater advertising resources are directed to this growing audience. Furthermore, Internet-based advertising allows great opportunities for advertisers to deliver much more targeted, relevant ads than conventional, off-line advertising techniques, such as billboards and the like.
An increasingly important area of advertising includes sponsored listings. Such listing can be presented, for example, in the form of sponsored links appearing among the results of a search conducted using an Internet-based search engine, such as Yahoo!, Ask Jeeves, etc. For instance, auction-based systems exist in which advertisers bid to be included among the sponsored search results for a particular search term or terms, and for the ranking or position of the placement of their sponsored listing among such results.
Online advertisers participating in such an auction-based system may face the challenge of managing and optimizing the ongoing bid process, for example, managing and optimizing thousands or hundreds of thousands of search terms or groups of search terms. Moreover, an advertiser may need to manage and optimize numerous advertising campaigns across numerous disparate advertising channels. A “channel” includes, but is not limited to, a particular entity, organization, or the like, through which advertising may be conducted. In the on-line advertising context, for example, channels can include web sites or search engines such as Yahoo!, MSN, CNN, etc.
While methods exist for the automatic bidding and maintenance of advertisement campaigns, current techniques do not provide advertisers with the ability to specify a maximum budget and have such a budget optimally spent on one or more advertisements in one or more campaigns. Advertisers may desire information specifying how a limited budget should be spent, the success of one or more advertisements in one or more campaigns and how profit may be maximized for a given budget. Additionally, before an advertiser modifies the money spent on one or more campaigns, an advertiser may desire information specifying how such a modification will affect profit, the number of users who view one or more advertisements, etc.
In order to overcome shortcomings associated with existing advertisement management and optimization techniques, embodiments of the present invention provide systems and methods for allowing an advertiser to manage one or more advertisement campaigns within a budget and further view and implement one or more advertising media plans providing a prediction of the performance of one or more advertisements in a given advertiser's budget.